The present invention relates to knowledge acquisition systems, and more specifically, to systems, methods, and computer products for optimally managing large rule sets.
Knowledge acquisition systems may be useful for capturing knowledge in the form of rules that may be used by the system to support the making of decisions or even to make decisions. Once encoded, rules can provide consistent answers for repetitive decisions, processes, and tasks.
As the number of rules in a system increases, the difficulty in managing those rules may also increase. For example, it may be difficult to know where to add new rules or to know when conflicting rules are causing erroneous results to be produced by the system. Further, because rules are generally processed and fired in sequential order, the ordering of the rules may grow less optimal as the number of rules continues to grow, thereby decreasing the performance of the system.
Therefore, there is a need for systems, methods, and computer products to optimally manage large rule sets.